Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday February 16, 2012 @11:11AM
from the or-do-you-have-something-to-hide? dept.

asto21 writes with this excerpt from The Indian Express: "As per amendments made to operators' licences, beginning May 31, operators would have to provide the Department of Telecommunications real-time details of users' locations in latitudes and longitudes. Documents obtained by The Indian Express show that details shall initially be provided for mobile numbers specified by the government. Within three years, service providers will have to provide information on locations of all users. The information will have some margin of error at first. But by 2013, at least 60 per cent of the calls in urban areas would have to be accurately tracked when made 100 metres away from the nearest cell tower. By 2014, the government will seek to increase the proportion to 75 per cent in cities and 50 per cent in suburban and rural areas."

They know where you live, fairly to safe if it doesn't have a signal a good place to check for you would be home. They want to know where you are going, who you are meeting with, etc. The best part is, doing something like that (and if they did track all records) you lose an alibi. "Sir person x, who we know you had a disagreement with, was murdered between the hours of 1am and 2am, being that you claim to be home but your phone was shut off just prior to the murder, I think we can safely assume you are gui

Sorry man, I believe you, but the real problem with GPS is that it reports where you've been as well as where you are!And facts don't matter, evidence doesn't matter, truth doesn't matter, all that matters is money.

Why not be upfront about it?I mean if you are going to invest millions of dollars into something like this, then you keep it secret to the public that means you are going to spend even more money to keep it under wraps. Only to have to make it public after you arrest a few people from it, because you need to use it as evidence, thus will get out publicly.The bigger the conspiracy the harder it will be to kept under wraps, I mean if you need to hire hundreds or thousand people to keep up an infrastructure of

It depends on how accessible this information is, and how accountable government officials would be? I'm fine with such requests, made via a court order or under pretty strictly defined emergency situations, so long as these requests are made a matter of public record. Not necessarily a big list showing who's been tracked - stats, broken down to agency and geographical area will do. If disclosing that a request had been made would harm an ongoing investigation, then set a confidentiality period measured in

Evidently I am in the/. minority thinking that the ability to use 911 in an emergency and have *GASP* "Big Brother" locate me (e.g., an ambulance dispatched by THE GOVERNMENT) is good thing.

OK, I'll bite.
1. Your ambulance is not dispatched by the Federal government. There is a big difference between your local sheriff knowing where you cell phone is to dispatch fire/police/medical services than three letter government agencies monitoring your whereabouts.
2. Having the ability to pinpoint any given cell phone when requested by the user while not actively monitoring movement or storing history is significantly different than knowing your location and movement with indefinite history and recor

Having been to India narrowing a persons location to within 100 meters still could mean thousands of people. It's like when they tracked the long island serial killer when he was calling a victim's sister from Times Square. They had little chance of picking out the guy from the hundreds of other people there.

If they track you for a week are they still not getting useful information?

Indeed, you could build not just a person's regular itinerary, but a network of who they are associated with. Arguably, you could build a pretty good profile of a person, including religious and political beliefs with probably high accuracy.

If only we had some sort of computing device that could analyze and winnow down the movements of hundreds of people at a time, esp. since we know where each started and each ends in a time period... but that's just crazy talk. Tin foil underwear nonsense, no one could pull that off.

What are you talking about? If you have a tuple with 8 bytes each, that is still only 24GB for just the data. In terms of storage, buy a machine with 128GB of RAM that asynchronously writes back to a RAID volume, what's the big deal? Maybe networking would be more of an issue, but that is probably very solvable too.

First, I'm guessing you meant 8 x 32bit values, not 8 bytes, which is pretty fair... Technically larger than needed, but probably better than real world with indexing/filesystem/etc overhead.Here's the thing though:It's 24GB PER SAMPLE.

What's the sample rate? Certainly not 1 second like GPS. Maybe 5 minutes? That would be 288 * 24GB = 7TB every day. Now, certainly some compression is possible (e.g. don't record samples if it didn't move in that period) and you could get by with maybe 10min samples, but

That's not a lot of data, if you think it is then you haven't seen how much data some corporations have. At my last job I didn't even notice a stray terabyte here or there.

Let's say you end up with 1TB worth of data per day and 400TB per year. Facebook has 21 petabytes in it's 2000 machine hadoop cluster . Every day they add 12TB of compressed data and scan through 800TB of compressed data. Yahoo had 40000 machines in it's various hadoop clusters.

400TB a year is nothing. You'd need maybe 100 of those 12TB facebook like servers for that (with replication, etc, etc.). Let's say 300 across two data centers for true redundancy. A moderately sized cluster as such things go.

The cost of a server is I think $10000/year. So that all comes out to only $3million per year, make it $10million with all the usual corruption involved in such things. Basically peanuts to a government.

Why would you need 8 32bit values to record coordinates? 8 bits for Latitude, 8 bits for Longitude and a 16 bit identifier should be sufficient. If you consider an ISP typically stores the first 4 bits of every packet on a gigabit network, a 32 bit per second storage system is not much of a stretch. Cisco already has a product that wraps co-ords up in SNMP packets for wireless devices. That is in addition to all of the other netflow information.

But storing it provides historical and statistical info. Companies pay big money for access to data like that. Universities doing 'studies' also want that data. Once the tracking is in place, it would be foolish to think the cell provider is keeping historicals for future sales.

Seems pretty obvious to me that the biggest result will be that people who are actual criminals will take pains to either turn off their cell phones, use stolen phones or just go without any time they are doing something criminal.

Meanwhile all the regular people are now even more at risk of the government or anyone else with access to this information like ex-boyfriends at the telco using this information against them.

Seems pretty obvious to me that the biggest result will be that people who are actual criminals will take pains to either turn off their cell phones, use stolen phones or just go without any time they are doing something criminal.

You have forgotten that the vast majority of criminals are utter and complete morons. I have a friend who is a RCMP officer and you'd be amazed with his stories of criminal idiots.

I'm assuming that, in addition to the general spirit of gung-ho surveillance zeal, they are operating under the wishful assumption that this will give them the capability to act more competently in the case of something like the Mumbai attacks in 2008, which were coordinated in large party by cellphone...

Seems pretty obvious to me that the biggest result will be that people who are actual criminals will take pains to either turn off their cell phones, use stolen phones or just go without any time they are doing something criminal.

Meanwhile all the regular people are now even more at risk of the government or anyone else with access to this information like ex-boyfriends at the telco using this information against them.

That's a good point. It's almost as if the point is massive surveillance for myriad purposes, rather than catching particular criminals.

New law requires credit card and valid photo ID to get a prepaid phone. It'd take a fool to give a criminal a tracking device, registered to the fool, so that they can take the hit when the manure hits the windmill. Poor and ghetto doesn't mean stupid. Stupid people don't stay in one piece very long. You want stupid, get a teenager. A suburban one. That thinks gangs are cool. It's a large crop.

This will surely stop the bad guys because it's unpossible for terrorists to get credit cards and photo ID's! Or break in to a shop, steal and activate some pre-paid phones, possibly with the help of the shop owner.

Really, why is it that governments feel they must track our every movement, our every interaction?
The answer is that governments - no matter how well they start off - all eventually end up seeking
to fully control the lives of their citizens: it seems to be some sort of unavoidable emergent property
of large aggregations of people. The idea of a citizen having some degree of personal sovereignty
just falls by the wayside and everybody just gets swept up in the imperatives of the government.
This may seem innocuous - or even benign to the naive - but the long term result is that it is a
seeking of control for the sake of having control. Being traced like this can hardly be considered
to be in the best interests of individual people.

Because after the attacks on that hotel, and a few other terrorist acts caused by foreign parties, the Indian government wants a way to track such suspects.

They can do that already if they know the cell number, but by knowing all numbers and locations at any one time, they can data-mine and compute probabilities of what each cell phone user is doing, relative to both historical and real-time data, and if it is suspicious or not.

For example, if you see a phone go from a known hideout to another target of int

If the purpose of providing user's location in real time is strictly for saving life and health of the same user (eg. if user dialed in for emergency, or is being actively searched for as a missing person, or as a person under stress as in danger of committing suicide, or a person suffering from Alzheimer's and known to wander off, etc..) then this measure seems logical and justified. However, if the purpose of the measure is to track all the people all the time, and recording this for yet unknown reasons,

Sure, it's fine, so long as it's properly regulated and we know who's making these requests and how often they're doing it. I want the right, with reasonable consideration given for ongoing investigations (not the endless war on terror shit), to ask a single agency to tell me who's been requesting a trace on me? This should go via court order or exceptional and well defined emergency circumstances, and anyone tracked must always have a right to an explanation.

Dont need to, the iPhone is really off when you actually turn it off. Those of us that have bothered to check by using an RF spectrum analyzer know this as fact.

In fact one of the engineers here was a real nutjob like the others here until we all started taking him cellphones to test. EVERY PHONE when turned off is actually off and not transmitting anything. The nutjobs that claim," you have to take out he battery" are just that. Nutjobs that have nothing to back up their claims.

Here's the thing : pagers emit zero RF, but are still able to do their job.

Since a cellphone probably contains all the circuitry that you'd need to make a pager (and then some), it's not unreasonable to suppose that it could be programmed to function as one.

Who is to say that a cellphone in standby mode doesn't have a "pager command" mode that will induce it to power up the transmitter, disclose it's location to the network, and then go back off again - but only on command. Monitoring the RF emissions of a

They can listen to the microphone pickup whenever they want, and that isn't exactly well known. My belief would only be beggared if they didn't have a wakeupandtelluswhereyouare command. It can be done, so it has been done, or could be with the next update. It would have to be implemented that way, or people would notice the considerable power drain GPS engenders on a phone.

A cuter trick would be an inertial tracker chip for the times the phone is shut off, or the phone can't get a signal, or GPS is blocke

Frankly, I have no idea why so many idiots think they have to take each and every call right away. I see no problem with letting a call/text go to voicemail and getting back to them on MY schedule.

I'm generally like you, but don't make the assumption that everyone falls into your use case. Some people may have jobs where they need to be completely reachable at times. They may be taking care of a sick relative, and need to be reached in case of an emergency. What works for you and me may not work for everyone, and that doesn't make them idiots.

So if some person from India calls me via his cell phone, should that government have my phone number information? Will they demand to know who I am based on that information? How quickly and readily will my government hand this info over to the Indian govt.?

We are no longer simply a police-state, it has become a Global police-state.

Government? In this country, government doesn't know who cell users are per se. And if you have a prepay (no contract) phone, your carrier might not either... which is why drug dealers (supposedly anyway) prefer prepay phones.

As far as the original story, I'm sure they're pushing it more along the lines of emergency services and/or civil protection orders ("We can prove from your cell phone data that yes you were on her property" sort of thing) as real-time location is pretty useless when it takes cops too

Why not implement the next step right away? Just attach a collar to every world citizen and track them. Add remote control by giving electrical shocks to the left and right, and you have 6 billion living drones. If one steps out of bound, declare them 'defective' and kill on the spot.

RFID implanted into the forehead that is used to verify identity for any transaction. Don't have the ID, you can't buy/sell goods once the tracking is required for every transaction.

He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.” Revelation 13:16-17

Almost every crimesolving technique and power is aimed squarely at making it easier to identify and round up criminals who are either stupid or who forgot to account for _all_ of the evidence which might be collected.

Smart criminals are always going to be harder to catch, because they're smart. But they're also a vanishingly small percentage of the criminal element. Eventually, in order to get away with a crime, luck aside, a person is going to have to be so smart that there's not really much chance of ca

In kolkata cell phone location tracking is already being utilized to solve a rape case where the female victim accuses 5 people who have raped her, but the locations reported by the cell phones of those accused persons show they never been in the area where the victim reported of being raped.

A company here in the US, TruePosition, has been offering the capability to law enforcement and military to identify the location of all active cell phones in a specific area and time. This technology has implications that go beyond simple surveillance - Here is a link: http://www.trueposition.com/national-security/

Basically, if you have a cellphone or mobile device and it is on...you can't hide. And, the profiles that can be developed from when and where a mobile device is used can be used to prevent and

Norway (the promised land of freedom and liberty, my ass) enacted a similar law last april, and we're implementing it this very monent.

We've already seen mass-dna-screening using phone based location data (before the law was even in legislation; seems the police already had access to this kind of data..), and lobbying for making retained data accessible to rights holder organizations without a court process (our law lumps cell phone tracking and internet access tracking together).

At some point the bad guys will stop carrying their cell phones, so the only people left to tract are citizens. First Skype/Google [slashdot.org], then blackberry [slashdot.org], and now this. Does India even have or even enforce privacy laws?

They could make an argument using the health care bill (since just about everything can be considered as pertaining to someone's "health") so that if an emergency exists they know where the individual is.

Since you brought up that much maligned health care bill in an apparent effort to slander it more, did you know (and I doubt if you did, or if you did, that you'd actually want it publicly known) that in 2014 all health plans in America will no longer be allowed to deny coverage because of a pre-existing condition? Also, the working poor (up to 133% of the poverty line; or roughly $12/hour for a full time worker who supports a family of four) will receive the same excellent Medicare that our elderly do. S

It was the so-called E911 law, it was 2002, and I was paying attention. It required location tracking for emergency purposes, and it was well understood that that meant GPS wired-in to every phone. 2005 was the deadline for all phones to be so-equipped if they were to be sold. I held on to my pre-2005 phone until 2007, when my provider informed me my phone would no longer work at a certain date, would I like a free, GPS-enabled phone?

You imply I'm lying, yet this is well known. Why is ignorance on your part

It was not a misstatement. It was making shit up. 911 calls have always required the relaying of location otherwise the system would be wireless. That E911 also requires location to be relayed was not some government post-911 plot, it's simply applying the same rules to wireless 911 calls. How would calling 911 on your cellphone be useful if you can't be located?

911 calls have always required the relaying of location otherwise the system would be wireless.

I think you mean "worthless" not wireless.

The thing is, before ~1995 few if any phones had location functionality, but you could still call 911 and tell them where you were. I would very much like to see a report of the number of 911 calls where the caller could not tell the operator his location (they always ask in case the computer is wrong). At which point we could have a debate over whether that number of cases justifies the extended cost in both dollars and privacy risk of the system. I've looked fo

I agree with you on many points. The problem is that the person above was spreading blatantly false and made up "facts". This is why most people shrug off what privacy advocates say, because the most vocal and shrill exaggerate and make things up to back up their statements. So again, the person I responded to was not make misstatements he was LYING.

You can disable GPS completely, moron. Hell my Galaxy S has GPS that doesn't even work most of the time anyway. Not to mention there are plenty of phones with no GPS at all. Don't let these facts get in the way of patting your own back though.

No, you can press a button that tells you it is turned off. It indeed turns off. But they can turn it back on, and you wouldn't know it. They can't-not have the capability - the hidden power is the real reason why the phone won't work if *you disable the GPS circuit itself*. I'm not talking about the feature, I'm talking about the the circuit board itself. Years ago, I read about people trying to disable the GPS hardware itself - the phone, if they succeeded, stops functioning. chop the wires, the phone won

Yes, because it isn't circuit damage that freezes the phone - the phone works fine - it is the fact that the phone reports that it will not function without the available GPS feed, period. That's not just a random crash - they anticipate someone trying to disable the software or hardware, and told the phone to lock up if it didn't find an available GPS feed. So, wrapping up, yes I hate a problem with the fact that the phone will not work if you disable tracking with software OR hardware. That would be the e

Who needs GPS? The phone company has detected that the signal from your phone has the following strengths at the following three base stations in your area... might not be enough to pinpoint you to within a yard, but they certainly know where you are to a city block or two. And should anyone be trying to track you down afterwards, there are a lot of urban places with security cameras which may have been pointing to places inside that city block.

Wait another five years and you'll find that even without a phone, the millions of cammeras embedded anyware will give enough biometrics to big brother's computers to track anyone outside their houses. All this they will cross reference with license plates, rfid tags, cell tower information, gps inside your phone, IP addresses you use, credit card transactions, electronic wallet transactions, and some other things that I miss.

The end result will be a historic log with your every physical movement, electroni

To be completely fair, while you are crazy and using made up facts to support your argument, tower triangulation can pretty much be used trivially to locate any one self-identifying broadcast signal(i.e. a cell phone keep-alive) with relatively accuracy. Tracking you does not require a GPS, just good coverage.

I am hyperbolic because I don't have time to post too much nuance, but here goes; yes, they can use towers. But if so, they didn't need GPS, did they? Of course it's for tracking, for pete's sake that's what the article is about! They are mandating GPS tracking, full time, for everyone, forever, soon, in India. I can't absorb why you are calling the description of the very point of the subject crazy. It is what they are doing. *stonkered*facepalm*

Let's put it simply. The GPS tracking is part of an API of a new type of police state. Who the "police" are doesn't matter, the API does. The tech of the API varies. Location services are one, the ability to listen in on the phone is another. The elimination of anonymity is wanted and granted. The removal of laws or the mere refusal to follow them are another. Cameras are another. Car tracking is another. ID requirements to travel are another. Put it all together, and it is what we fastidiously condemned So

So the intended mockery only shows that you just don't care... it has no other meaning. You imply that to think otherwise is crazy, or the facts are wrong, yet we are sane and you only pointing out we were right all along and somehow this makes us crazy... my head hurts